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Monday, January 8. 2007

At the risk of sounding like a employee with yet another Google posting, I want to talk a bit about the Google Zeitgeist site. It's their public statistics site that shows search trends and patterns.

Their statistics are automatically generated and then the humans look for trends and pull out some for the public.

They certainly reveal things about our times in a sociological way. There does seem to be a "pop" culture orientation, but that probably is the Net culture. (I bolded a few below that are EdTech in nature.)

Zeitgeist is a German term (zeit = time geist = ghost) meaning "spirit of the time" and it often refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era.

How to... 1. how to refinance 2. how to wiki 3. how to drift 4. how to podcast 5. how to scream 6. how to levitate 7. how to tattoo 8. how to blog 9. how to kickflip10. how to draw

Perhaps you know that if you type into the Google search box define: and then any word, it will bring back sites that have definitions (rather than just pages with the word) So here is what we were trying to define in 2006. I had to look a few up just to find out what the word meant (obviously, this is internationally flavored) 1. define promiscuous 2. define web 2.0 3. define ftw 4. define calidad 5. define ajax 6. define ensayo 7. define ciencia 8. define administracion 9. define harlequin10. define filosofia

And you can check the "Zeitgeist This Week" which they list as "Gaining Search Queries" Here's stats for the week ending December 30, 2006.1. james brown2. saddam hussein3. che4. norad5. gerald ford6. jessica cutler7. new years8. dreamgirls9. music downloads10. weight watchers